American by Day (Sigrid Ødegård #2)

by Derek B. Miller

The heart is one of the few places where facts and truth may be separable.

The fact is, all scientists—and investigators, too—know that most spontaneous insights happen only when you’re steeped in the data. I like to think that intuitive sparks are a function of creativity and analysis rubbing against each other.”

“Melinda, there is a difference between what we call the investigative question and the interview question. The first one is what you secretly want to know. The second one is what you ask in order to learn it. They are seldom the same question. That’s the science. The art is engaging your subject into revealing information you want to know through indirect questioning. If you’re treating me as an interviewee here, and you want me to reveal information, you’re going to have to try harder. I won’t blame you for doing it, but you’re going to need to raise your game if you want to win. OK?”

“Facts are not evidence,” she says. “Facts become evidence when they are mobilized in support of an argument.”

That’s America’s paradox—your individualism is a strong cultural trait that weakens you as a community and you just can’t see it. You worry that working together undermines your myth of self-reliance, so you hyperexaggerate its value to mask the fear. If you don’t do this, you lose your sense of being American. You’re basically doomed.”

Her most unexpected observation in studying for her outlaw motorcycle gang exam was how all the clubs adopted American tropes about freedom, individuality, and rebellion and then demanded complete conformity to them. It was her first glimpse into the complex system that organized American culture—even when it was being exported to Scandinavia.

“Yes. I have a master’s degree in divinity from Loyola. I wrote my thesis on something called Accommodation Theory. Every religion, when it spreads out, has to reach some kind of accommodation with whatever’s there already, otherwise it won’t really stick. The question is how that works and what makes it work or not. Interesting stuff. I focused on the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity.”

“Why did you get divorced?” she asks him, hand on the door and pinching sleep from her eyes. “We didn’t have any questions left for each other. Why aren’t you married?” “When I was young I thought it was me. When I grew up I started thinking it was them. And then I stopped thinking about it entirely.”

“Tell me the secret to death,” she answered, mocking him. “You have to back into it,” he’d told her. “What does that mean?” “You stop staring ahead into the void. There’s nothing to see. You need to turn around. Watch life. Watch it like a rabbit about to come out of a hat. Keep your eye on it the whole time until—like that—the seeing is no more. That’s the trick.”

Are we most truthful during our anger or just the most creative in finding ways to hurt people?

Irv had been taught in a business course once that all strategic action has four components: a goal, resources you’ll use, methods you’ll perform, and—at the center of it all—a theory or argument about why using those resources a certain way will bring about the desired goal.

She is angry at men. All men. For their stupidity, their lies, their egotism, their irrelevant words, their aggressive personalities and hairy backs. She is angry at them for what they did and didn’t do. For what they say and leave unsaid. For the timbre of their voices and the length of their strides, the ease by which they open jars and their inexplicable incapacity to return even the smallest objects to their rightful locations. She is sick of investing in them without dividend, trusting in them without reward, and pouring her guts out in motels—with words, emotion, trust, nostalgia, laments, confessions—to wake up the next day—feeling good, feeling closer, feeling unburdened and more earthy and connected and natural and complete—and be abandoned at her own moment of need, and set free, once again, to solve everything herself.

“Criminal investigation is about solving riddles from the past when the damage is done, and it is already too late,” Sigrid says, looking at Marcus. “What I saw in America made me want to get ahead of things rather than show up behind them. Maybe step into the fray. See things from another perspective. Make things better.” Morten smiles at her. “That’s the spirit.”